From the archives: Biden profile

Joe Biden's story starts and ends, and starts again here: The Polk County Fairgrounds, home of the Iowa State Fair. Twenty years ago it all went wrong in a few poorly chosen words. Now it is the place to exorcise the ghosts.

Twenty years ago, Biden was his generation's New Voice, the Democrat whose rhetoric and youthful exuberance recalled the Kennedy mystique. For a time, he seemed the ideal antidote to the autumnal stagger of the Reagan administration's latter days.

His ability to talk in that rousing fill-the-hall style had put Biden in this place. Then came his speech at the State Fair and his failure to credit a British politician, Neil Kinnock.

His license with Kinnock's words were soon outed by the Dukakis' campaign, sending Biden's presidential dreams sprawling into the wilderness. Rarely has someone as verbose as Biden been so persecuted for something he didn't say.

And after all of that, he almost died, and had his brain sliced open on an operating table.

A very bad year.

The narrow street in front of the fairgrounds pavilion is lined with signs: Clinton, Obama, even Richardson. None for Biden.

But there are the Ears of Experience.

It's the first thing you see inside the building. A large display featuring mounted ears of corn stacked vertically to mark each candidate's time in office. Biden beats them all, with 34 ears -- er, years.

More than 1,000 people pack the room. Biden speaks first, followed by Bill Richardson and the headliner, Hillary Clinton. He's pumping hands, fronting the Smile: his wide-angle grin with the perfect white teeth.

Biden quickly makes it clear what this campaign, 20 years later, is about. He's here to "tell the truth" to the American people. He's running this campaign his way, screw the naysayers. He's the Democrat, not only with more "ears" of experience, but with a plan for Iraq. He's tough on crime. He's big on God. He's the statesman coming to rescue his party.

Unfortunately, the mic keeps going out, which dampens the effect a bit:

"[Muffle] know that America is [flump] more than a country, it's [flump] idea."

But that's the problem. Since 1987, the timing has never been great for Biden. The following morning, in the small town of Guthrie Center, in the middle of his plea about not allowing the White House to exploit fear of terrorism, the town air raid siren starts wailing, drowning out Biden's words.

Timing.

"It was over for me, before it ever really got started," says Paul Newman's pool player, Fast Eddie Felson, in "The Color of Money."

That 1986 movie came 25 years after Newman first played Felson in "The Hustler." That Felson was brash, cocksure, had an answer for everything. At the end of the film, he's ruined, pushed out of the game by larger forces. "The Color of Money" finds him aged, ruminative, watching younger players chase the glory that was meant for him. Eventually, he's seduced into taking one more shot at the big time.

In '87, Biden was the hustler. Now he's the seasoned hand. He is a high priest of the Senate, a master of its mores and a beneficiary of its homage to seniority. He chairs the prestigious Foreign Relations Committee, and before that the Judiciary Committee; and has long been a regular on the Sunday talk shows.

The question is whether he, like Felson, was first too young, and then too old, for the ultimate prize.

Clinton ends up arriving 90 minutes late, when half the disgruntled crowd is gone. Could be bad for her campaign, the Biden folks say, because "they don't do coronations" here. But Biden, with poor poll numbers and meager funds, has little to show but pluck.

Because of that, Biden has wedded himself to capturing Iowa's rural voters. After the speech, Biden's national political director, Danny O'Brien, explains that Biden will visit one small burg after the other, because half of Iowa's caucus-goers come from there. It's the shot he has.

O'Brien is relatively new to the Biden circle. That makes him an exception. The campaign is more like a family business. Accompanying Biden on the road are his sister, two nieces, his sons, his wife, old friends from Delaware and former campaign aides from 30 years ago. Biden's team travels in one or two vehicles, staying at low-budget hotels with free continental breakfasts. At one stop he puts away the folding chairs himself.

It's all enough to cause one to wonder why in the world a six-term senator would want to schlep around like this -- especially in the state where he lives in a peculiar form of infamy.

His longtime friend and former chief of staff, Ted Kaufman, says it's a matter of Biden believing his experience, especially in national security and foreign affairs, is needed.

At a restaurant in Des Moines is Biden's sister, Valerie Biden Owens, who ran his first campaign, ever, for county council in Delaware, almost 40 years ago, and has been at her brother's side ever since. And even though all seem loathe to address the ghosts hovering about in Iowa, she finally can't contain herself.

"He [gave credit to] Kinnock in speeches all over the state," Owens says. "That was the one time. The only time."

The press murdered him for it.

Whereas politicians these days are getting arrested for sending secret foot-signals in airport restrooms and the administration finds itself defending memos about torture, Biden's political career almost ended 20 years ago over lifting a phrase.

Plagiarism, in politics no less.

But that's what happened. In the summer of 1987, Biden, searching for a campaign theme, latched onto a speech by Kinnock, a British politician. He loved the working-class hero stuff, as it mirrored Biden's own rise from the coal towns of Scranton, Pa. and Claymont, Del. He began quoting it wholesale in speeches, but usually was careful to give credit. At the State Fair, he forgot.

That's all it took. Dukakis' campaign manager, John Sasso, circulated a tape that matched Biden and Kinnock's speeches side by side. Soon, there was a front page article in The New York Times (by Maureen Dowd, no less). A media scrum ensued. Irregularities in Biden's law school record were aired; others were questioning his use of Bobby Kennedy's words.

It was raining everywhere. In Washington meanwhile, as the new chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden watched as opposition to Reagan's choice for the Supreme Court, Robert Bork, exploded, forcing Biden to split his time between the campaign trail and the Senate.

He surrendered his bid for the presidency and dedicated himself to fighting Bork. Later he would preside over the Clarence Thomas nomination and watch with dismay as hearings became a sordid soap opera.

Lives of senators are measured over long stretches of time. To the average American who watches the evening news and reads the occasional non-fiction tome, Joe Biden effectively disappeared from their lives in 1991.

Saturday, Greenville, Iowa.

Fall Saturdays, with competition from college football, are tough campaign days. The main town square is quiet.

But inside a cramped coffeehouse, Biden has 20 people waiting for him. He road tests his new speech.

"How did we ever allow the Republican right to take the high ground on values?" Biden says. "We Democrats aren't fighting back. We don't fight back on the values front. I can't wait to debate Rudy Giuliani. I mean, come on man!"

Outside of the coffeehouse, Biden's voice booms through the screen door. Kevin Shilling, an organic farmer, is leaving. But he's on board. "I like what he has to say about values. It's about time we start fighting back," he says.

This "values" speech (written the day before by Biden himself) is intended to play to Biden's strengths as a candidate -- primarily his track record as a family man and churchgoer. His devotion to his kin is more than legendary, it's a documented fact.

But it was borne out of the worst circumstances imaginable. For a moment, Biden had made politics look like paint-by-numbers. The middle-class kid from Claymont decided to run for U.S. Senate at 29, against the state's best-known politician. It was quixotic, or to use the one-cent word: crazy. He, his wife, Neilia, and his sister, Valerie, criss-crossed the state, taking retail politics down to the discount level.

Biden made it work. He won. But before he could even take office, Neilia, his two sons, and their baby daughter were in a brutal car accident in Delaware, killing his wife and baby, severely injuring Beau and Hunter.

Biden stayed by their side during their recovery, refusing for a time to return to D.C. to take his Senate seat.

Biden vowed to remain engaged in his sons' lives. Valerie became their surrogate mother, and Biden began the daily commute from Wilmington to Washington that made him an Amtrak champion for life. Even after Biden met and married his second wife, Jill, five years later, he didn't surrender the back-breaking schedule.

He has been rewarded with two now-grown boys who are intensely loyal to him, who stump in Iowa for him and who speak the same language of electoral politics. Beau Biden, now Delaware's attorney general, says of it all: "It's a beautiful life ... that takes work. As a Dad, he rebuilt this family."

Saturday, Corning, Iowa.

As good as Biden can be on the stump, he might be better in a small room. He's an old-school space invader, bending over, getting in people's faces, squeezing their shoulders, using their names freely. ("And the CEO gets a bonus. Is that fair, Larry?") He's a Universal Uncle, filled with hyperbolic warnings about the future ("This election can change the direction of the world!"), mixed with anecdotes about his family, the father who couldn't afford to send him to college, the sister-in-law who lost her pension. And he isn't above a little global name-dropping to illustrate the relationships three decades in the Senate gives you. ("The phone rang, and it was Al Gore." "I worked with Bono.")

He'll answer every last question at an event. Here, in tiny Corning, he stands at a chalkboard at a public library and painstakingly explains to a crowd of 20 wedged into orange plastic chairs how to achieve stability in Iraq, as well as peace in the Middle East, as if there's an adult education course in statecraft.

He dissects the Iraqi constitution, talks about the Ottoman Empire, speaks about Iraq's history as a British territory, and, of course, delves at length into the Biden Plan. Somehow, in September, he persuaded 74 fellow senators to endorse a comprehensive plan that would divide Iraq into three semi-autonomous regions for each dominant sectarian group, with a weak central government.

Biden embraces his track record in the Senate. He points to his sponsorship of the 1994 crime bill and his support of the Violence Against Women Act. He uses his work in the 1990s in helping the Balkan peace process as establishing his bona fides on Iraq. And he reminds listeners that his Foreign Relations Committee work means he has leaders such as Jalal Talibani, the president of Iraq, on speed dial.

Saturday, 5,000 feet above southeastern Iowa.

How many people walk the same path 20 years apart? After Greenville and Corning, aboard a plane so small that there's only room for Biden, the pilots and two others, provided they don't mind their knees knocking, Biden won't admit to any sense of deja vu. This time it's different. He is different.

In 1987, "I was a 42-year-old guy who never really when I started off intended to really run. Quite frankly, I thought more about how to win than how to govern. I wasn't nearly as sure as what I wanted to do if I were able to govern. Today it is almost the opposite, unfortunately," he half-shouts over the roar of the propellers. "This time, rightly or wrongly, I am given a fair amount of credit by serious press guys for being ready to be president, but there's grave doubt whether I can get the nomination to run for president. So it's kind of a flip, do you know what I mean?"

And he marvels at the media attention given Clinton and Barack Obama at the expense of the other candidates.

"It's sort of been liberating. I don't feel constrained in this campaign. I'm going to win or lose on my own terms. One of the things that last time taught me was the worst way to lose was on somebody else's terms."

Because of the long road he has traveled, Biden has an arsenal of life experience for every issue, allowing him to fuse the personal and the political almost effortlessly in public.

Education? Jill Biden is a teacher, has taught kids for 30 years.

Iraq? Well, Beau is in the National Guard. His unit is deploying to Iraq next year.

Health care? "They literally had to take the top of my head off twice," Biden likes to say. "At least I had health insurance."

As part of Biden's very bad year, back in 1987, during the campaign, he began suffering from paralyzing headaches. Turns out he had a bleeding vessel in the brain. Just as doctors were cutting open his skull, the vessel burst. During his convalescence, he suffered a pulmonary embolism and almost died again.

His friends and family will tell you that the plagiarism scandal that forced him out was, in a way, a blessing. When Biden became stricken, he was home, close to Walter Reed Army Hospital, where he eventually had his surgery.

Sunday, Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Iowa's reputation for personal campaigning is clear on a Sunday morning house party in Cedar Rapids. "Every time I hear him I am more and more convinced he's the guy I want in the White House," says LaDawn Edwards.

This is the third time she has seen Biden. And she's almost convinced.

Later, Biden addresses Teamsters, and it's here where his traditional Democratic principles, his blue-collar Irishness, resonates. "This is not your father's fight," he intones. "They've convinced themselves that you don't even know what's best for your own members. There would be no middle class in America without the union movement!"

Biden quotes his own father: "I don't expect government to solve my problems, but I expect it to understand my problems!"

Dave O'Brien, a union organizer, is on his second tour as a Biden volunteer and still can't believe what knocked out his candidate the last time. "Plagiarism? Give me a break," he said.

Two years after Biden flamed out, O'Brien's father died. And Biden flew up to Sioux City for the funeral. "He didn't do it for political reasons," O'Brien says. "He did it because he knows about loss."

Later, back on the plane, Biden remembers the funeral. He had been avoiding Iowa. "They stuck with me when I was being called a lying no good so-and-so. How could I not? And I really did not want to go back to Sioux City."

Biden agrees with O'Brien's assessment about knowing loss -- and he says that's why he remains loyal to as many people as he can. "The people who got me through are the people who stayed loyal to me."

He returns, once again, to the bleak period after the accident. "What you want to know," he says, plane engines humming, "is how do I survive this? I think you are blinded by your despair. It's kind of like you're getting sucked inside yourself into a black hole. Except what you really need sometimes, you just need to know someone else made it."

In that vein, for years Biden's neurosurgeons asked him to visit other patients to reassure them prior to surgery. "I had never met them in my life," Biden says. "But you know when you have sort of a gift. The gift is you survived. You know if you give that to somebody, it makes you feel worthwhile. Because people did it for me."

Those close to Biden say while he wants to win, he doesn't need to win, maybe the way he would have 20 years ago. That's because he knows the precious life he has built will be there, and ironically, losing is what could keep that life stable and intact while winning would blow it to smithereens.